At which juncture two young men decided to escort Sophy home after the bash.
“No, thank you,” she murmured soberly, though she’d had several cups of the lethal punch. “I will walk back with my friends.”
But they wouldn’t take no for an answer. One thing led to another, and a fight broke out. Agnes, who was always abstemious, pulled Sophy away from the fray, went in search of the others, gathered them up—even Carolyn, who was inclined to stay and see what happened—and the seven of them departed while the two combatants were still rolling around amid spilled punch and broken crockery. They were well down the block before the police car pulled up in front of the frat house, and soon thereafter they were all in Agnes and Sophy’s room, drinking cocoa, eating popcorn, and laughing immoderately at nothing much.
“You certainly made a hit,” said Faye to Sophy. “Cut quite a swath through the male population, you did.”
“I don’t like it,” said Sophy. “It’s really very disturbing.” Her voice sounded more than merely disturbed: it quavered with outrage or shock. “I don’t understand men.”
“Do any of us understand men?” Jessamine asked in a faraway, cold voice. “I never have.”
Carolyn glanced curiously at Jessamine and said, “It’s not just men. Do any of us understand people? Including us? I don’t understand me!”
That started them all off. Agnes, in a sober confessional mood, told them she had first decided to be a nun when Father Conley had told her she was fortunate to be plain and gawky because she would not therefore be an occasion of sin. Though calmly pale during the telling, she became flushed and agitated when the others told her she was not gawky, and this led to a discussion of female beauty, during which Bettiann told them about pretending to be beautiful, how it often worked just to pretend, and about judges who looked at little girls like so many pet puppies and tried to put their hands down her panties.
Faye erupted in outrage, saying the judges must all be Humbert Humberts, like in Nabokov’s book Lolita, the one that had been banned, and Jessamine started to tell them something about herself but then broke off, very pale, and ran for the bathroom. Ophy told about her father’s not wanting to pay for her education even though he could afford it, and how her mom had to go to court to make him do it, and Carolyn picked up the true confessions, tipsily telling them about Albert. Somehow she got off onto Hal’s infectious grin and warm brown eyes. She couldn’t put him out of her mind, she said, which wouldn’t do, of course. Catholics did not get divorces or break up other people’s homes. Neither did Crespins. In any case, she, Carolyn, was already promised to Albert.…
“Who promised you?” Faye asked, jeering. “I don’t remember your saying you promised you.”
Carolyn paused woozily, trying to remember who had promised her to Albert. “I don’t know,” she confessed with a pixilated giggle. “He’s just … he’s always been there. I don’t want Albert, but I guess I think I will want Albert, because everyone always tells me I’ll want Albert.”
“You know what they’re doing to you, don’t you?” Faye asked, her voice slurred velvet, furry at the edges from the punch they’d all drunk. “They’re cutting and pasting you, Car-o-line. They’re taking everything that pleasures you and cutting it off. There’s a thing they do to girls in Africa, cutting off they little clits so they can’t ever get any pleasure there. It’s a mutilation. Maybe yours dohn hurt so much right now, but it’s the same thing. That’s what they’re doing to you. Mutilation.”
The word was only a word, but it stayed with Carolyn like a mantra. She told herself later it was just that she was drunk, very un-Crespinly drunk, so drunk she hadn’t even been offended by Faye’s vulgar language, but it wasn’t only that. It was true. The aunts were trying to mutilate her, and so was Albert. It was a revelation. Damn the aunts. Damn Albert.
The conversation went on to other things, and during all of it Sophy listened and listened, very much, Carolyn thought, like an anthropologist in a native environment, her ears positively quivering.
“Where were you brought up?” Carolyn asked her during a lull in the conversation.
“Oh, here and there,” Sophy said, flushing a little. “Nowhere in particular.”
“Country or city?”
“Oh, country! Yes, very rural, my people. My upbringing was all very ordinary and dull, really. Farm life is very much the same from day to day. That’s why I’m so excited about being here, learning all your stories.”
“Our stories?” Carolyn laughed. “We don’t even have stories.”
“Oh, you do! You’ve been telling them tonight! I want to hear everything, all about you, all about women everywhere.…”
She gave a similar answer every time they asked about her. Sometimes she looked uncomfortable, sometimes she smiled, but she never said anything definite. Carolyn thought she was probably part European, part Native American, or even South American, basing that idea on the panpipes Sophy sometimes played—a very Andean instrument, Jessamine remarked that Sophy played the drum, too, which was Indian or maybe Asian. They asked Agnes, who, being Sophy’s roommate, should know, but Agnes only shrugged. “She won’t tell me. She meditates sometimes, usually early in the morning. She says she’s invoking a guardian spirit, but that’s all she’ll say.”
In anyone else it would have been infuriating. In anyone else it would have led to suspicion, or ill feeling. In Sophy it was part of her charm. Her drumming and piping were mysterious, her meditative exercises unfathomable,
